Video of the Day: DARPA's First Crowdsourced War Machine

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is charged with developing all of the new technology used by the United States military. No small task -- though, if you're going to put that responsibility on any agency, DARPA has proven itself time and again. Still, could the people do better? Wondering that same thing, DARPA decided to launch XC2V, a challenge to crowdsource a new concept vehicle designed for both combat delivery and evacuation and combat reconnaissance.

After the public had a chance to provide feedback and vote on the proposals that came in, a winner was selected in May. Over the past 14 weeks, Local Motors has been building a working prototype of that design, FLYPMODE, which was conceived by Victor Garcia. A video of the construction process is embedded below.

"Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle," Dvice, part of the SyFy Online Network, explained. "In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too."